The summary: Cloudsmith provides a way for vendors to sell, license and distribute software as packages. To any customer, anywhere in the world, across a reliable and performant infrastructure, and handling all licensing and invoicing / billing challenges. As most of the readership of this blog will know, a huge proportion of the software developed around the world is dependent upon the third-party packages and libraries we integrate into our projects.

A friend that can’t keep a secret isn’t one you’ll rely on. The same is true for your mission critical CI/CD tool that you have to entrust with credentials for each integrated component. Keeping your secrets safe can be a challenge for CI/CD tools, since they need to connect to such a variety of other services. Each one needs its own password or token that must be kept hidden from prying eyes.

The code we develop ends up being packaged into artifacts that are consumed as dependencies during the development of other software components. We rely on an artifact repository manager, like JFrog Artifactory, to resolve the complex challenges that come with consuming and developing all of these artifacts. Artifactory serves as the foundation for managing binaries in so many organizations, both large and small, as part of an effective CI/CD pipeline.